


living proof

by MiniInfinity



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Domestic, M/M, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Tattoos, wonwoo is junhui's tattoo artist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-06
Updated: 2020-10-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:20:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26852842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiniInfinity/pseuds/MiniInfinity
Summary: Four months ago, Wonwoo has promised to show his tattoos once he finishes with Junhui’s first tattoo. He finally fulfills that promise and more.
Relationships: Jeon Wonwoo/Wen Jun Hui | Jun
Kudos: 40





	living proof

**Author's Note:**

  * For [roseey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/roseey/gifts).



> happy birthday to roseey! :')
> 
> idk how many times i rewrote this but i hope it's enough and i hope you enjoy your day! :'D

“Ever since I went to your shop, you still haven’t shown me your tattoo.”

Wonwoo’s head snaps away from the kitchen faucet running water over the two mugs and to the couch, to where Junhui drapes himself all over the cushions with his feet hanging over the armrests. Pointing toes wrapped in the fluffy pair of socks he pulled out of his drawer moments ago, comfortable in a place Junhui has only been to once before, Wonwoo can think the same thing about himself as he pours a mug of coffee for Junhui, pours a shot of syrup and milk and tries to hide the fact that he doesn’t need to think twice about how Junhui prefers his coffee. His eyes narrow down into tunnel vision of deliberate fingertips tracing the rising ink and second skin all over his forearm. A ghost of a smile across his lips, Wonwoo questions whether or not it’s really there, whether or not Junhui is content with the tattoo he finished not too long ago.

Four months ago, at the brink of summer and autumn, Junhui stepped into the tattoo shop. With a lighthearted joke of “a clean tattoo artist” aimed to insult or remind him to pull up his gray sweater paws, Wonwoo couldn’t help aligning the constellations at his eyes, bright against dulled-out fluorescence of the tattoo shop, more than the tattoo in his sketchbook. Appointments were never the same after that if they didn’t consist of the humming between buzzes of the tattoo gun and feigns of murder plastered all over Junhui’s face as he lifted the needle a mere centimeter above his skin.

And a month ago, Wonwoo couldn’t help but fall a little more for the canvas than for the art and ink themselves.

Between remnants of light salvaged through winter clouds and pattering rain, he turns his face away from Junhui, tries to hide the blush of heat seething all over the back of his neck, the tips of his ears, the balls of his feet wanting to bounce anywhere but within his own home.

Wonwoo has tattoos himself, not exactly visible to the world around him and definitely not visible to anyone simply passing through the shop. There’s one just below the curve of his collarbone, _Cogito, ergo sum_ that appears italicized in the way it follows the bone. Junhui caught that one on his first question at the front counter, the same day he came in for advice for tattoos and where and what his first one should be. A hunch to grab a clipboard, to let him fill out paperwork, he remembers nearly dropping the entire thing when he heard Junhui remark an “Is it scary getting a tattoo on your collarbone?” He remembers the instinct of slapping his palm close to his heart, pinning his sweater to cover the blushing skin there.

But it’s not the only one marking up Wonwoo’s skin.

There’s another of a blossoming rose at his shoulder blade, a second at the corner of his lower back, a third threading up a stem over his spine and budding almost to the base of his neck. One for his brother, one for his father, and one for his mother. A mere outline of each rose and fullest petals coated with his skin tone, he’s still not sure what color to dip the petals into. All three that he hopes will one day become less lonesome, that the skin on his back will become a flower garden of his parents’ favorite flower, despite neither one of his parents seeing a single drop of ink on his skin. His mother has yet to witness his art go from ink and paper to ink and flesh.

“I promised that?” Wonwoo teases out of him, perhaps to overtake the volume of his heart at his ears. He stops the stirring in Junhui’s mug and returns to the couch with their two mugs of coffee, his caffeine fix camouflaging black ink at his work desk and Junhui's fix much closer to the pale walls of his apartment. Junhui sits back up on the couch and retreats to one end, makes up space for him to sit at the other armrest.

A humble “Thank you, Wonwoo” over porcelain brim and a sip of white coffee, Junhui sends a feather of a smack at his shoulder. “Yes, you did. You said you’d show me your tattoo once you’re finished with mine.”

“I said once you’re _satisfied_ with your tattoo,” he corrects him with a grin over the rim of his own mug.

“I am,” he tries to cover his skin and ink work with the sentiments. “I asked Soonyoung to have you do my tattoo or I wouldn’t get it at all.” Wonwoo tries to mirror the way Junhui’s eyes linger and leave somewhere over his face, linger and leave a patch of his features for another, linger and leave for Wonwoo to question what his eyes latch onto in the first place. Linger and leave, linger and leave, his own eyes chasing for the same map across Junhui’s face and falling behind the moment speaks again. His voice smokes up the quiet between them, “I can’t wait for it to finish healing.”

Wonwoo shrugs and leans back towards the armrest. Clients come into the shop with hopes of a new layer of skin, perhaps a story to tell that doesn’t consist of scars, and exit with gratitude tumbling off their eyes and sparks lighting up the whole shop, the possibilities of going for second or third tattoos. He’s not sure exactly why Junhui’s words in particular spark something in him, lighting up the wintering apartment brighter than the white snow at the windows.

But he’s not exactly against it, showing his tattoo, and he’s pretty sure the confidence to show some skin surges from the caffeine in his veins. He’s just never had to peel off layers of his clothes back enough to expose more ink than skin. He’s never had anyone ask him to show his tattoos at all, especially when he uncovers his unfinished ink-works to his reflections and to the tattoo artist only. He might need to book another appointment soon, to bloom a fourth rose onto his penning collection, once Soonyoung returns from his vacation.

“It’s not finished,” wheedles hesitant between them.

“So?” Junhui pipes. Wonwoo makes out the slow, patient flutter of his eyelashes, his two hands cupping the mug that zeroes his age much younger than he really is. It makes him forget that they’re only one month apart in age. It’s innocent, naive almost when he asks a bashful, “Is it somewhere...somewhere private?”

He shrugs a second time, but his shoulders remain raised when Junhui’s palm comes down for a second light smack on his arm. It cracks something inside of him, just enough so. He places his mug on the coffee table and tags the hem of his sweatshirt down enough to showcase the words at his collarbones. The chill across his shoulder tells him Junhui can only read half of the tattoo.

“I know _that_ one.” Junhui lifts a hand, but it suspends there when his fingertips hover just a stroke away from holding his own. His voice lowers, and it’s nothing like the Junhui he knew this whole time, these four months. The serenity of his voice into vulnerable wonder he’s never had anyone break into when it comes to tattoos, let alone his own, is an odd kind of comfort and release as he persists, “Can I see all of this one?”

He traces the trouble of a swallow down Junhui’s throat once that question is thrown in the air, when Wonwoo drops his hand from the hem and curls his fingers at his lap. He chances his eyes back up when Junhui lowers his hands back down. Over the curve of his glasses, Wonwoo studies the parting seam of his lips, slight in the dark but grows in a question leeching off the silence.

“You can,” whispers through like those greeting autumn leaves when he first met Junhui. Against the oncoming wind, lost in the direction they’ll go, if they’ll go inside the tattoo shop at all. The world shuts black behind his eyes for a second when Junhui hasn’t hitched a breath in a while. “You can see them all.”

“Are-are you sure?”

He nods. “You can look, Junhui.”

The apartment must have broken all of its defenses against the winter in a span of minutes because when there’s a slow tug of his hem down that isn’t from his own doing, he can’t help the shiver up his spine. It’s wordless between them, feeds off the search and study at Junhui’s eyes and the stars at the corners, accidental brushes of fingertips at his skin. Junhui sets his skin ablaze in pink flares and his hands guiding time.

His first words to break the silence are ones that Wonwoo has never heard of when it comes to this tattoo in particular. “Are these words you live by?”

Wonwoo isn’t sure where his words strayed off to, and he has no intentions of retracting their first steps. A brush of warmth painting the old ink there revives his first time lying down in the tattoo shop. He inhales each stroke of Junhui’s fingertips over his skin, coursing each stroke of letters. The focus of Junhui’s eyes stops himself from curling at the ticklish touches he would have shied away against.

“Were you scared to get this one?”

Wonwoo remembers being offered a stress ball by Soonyoung before his first session but declining it. He shakes his head.

“Were you scared to get your other tattoo?”

Wonwoo remembers slapping his sketchbook across Soonyoung’s work table on a slow day and asking if he thinks he can do the job justice. The offer of double the pay just for the first part of this second tattoo, he thinks he had nothing to be afraid of after getting through his first one. He shakes his head a second time.

“Are you scared to show me your other tattoo?”

Wonwoo’s eyes drift up at his question. He blinks and suddenly, his hand is gentle around Junhui’s wrist, so close to his chest. He shakes his head a third time.

He backs out of Junhui’s reach at first, drops his own hand lonesome from his wrist, and he knows the pink across his skin will start drowning in red any second. The chill of winter is harsh to his skin, lets himself drown more on caffeinated confidence than the red and pink. So when he tugs Junhui to his bedroom, flutters of his heart into the rhythm of a forbidden love story almost, the first thing he does once he lets the knot of their digits come undone is to part the curtains. It’s just enough for sunlight to trespass a peek into but not enough for anyone else’s eyes outside to. He sits at the end of his bed, moves the book he left back to his nightstand.

“It’s not finished yet,” Wonwoo admits once more as Junhui takes the space across from him, fingers twisting his sweater’s bottom hem in abandonment of that caffeine surge and confidence. “I don’t-I’m not really sure if it will ever be.”

He stills his head from swaying to the side as he glances at Junhui from the corner of his eye. There’s a smile there, forgiving with absolutely nothing to be sorry for.

“Are you sure you still want to do this?” Junhui lays it out in a secret, as if they’re not the only ones in his bedroom, as if it’s not just the lingering sunlight from winter’s passing between them. “You don’t have to. I can wait until it’s finished. Until you're comfortable.”

He takes a deep breath in, “I’m sure,” and lets it escape, “I’m sure, Junhui. It’s just that you’re the first.”

Before another word can pass through, he turns his back to Junhui, faces towards gray winter light between curtains. With one swift arm over and up, a ripple of cloth settles at his bed and a ripple of a gasp slices between these four gray walls. He shivers once more at the fingertip running up his spine almost immediately, watches the single touch raise the hair on his arms, goosebumps at their wake. He shuts his eyes, sigh melding for the petals Junhui seems to be tracing at his shoulder blade.

“These roses are beautiful, Wonwoo,” Junhui’s voice is barely decipherable against the awe. He doesn’t turn around. “What color are these going to be?”

His hands search for a grip, head limping forward so Junhui can outline the bloom of the flowers and hours dedicated to this craft more clearly. “I’m not sure yet. I just know I want to add one more.”

The fingertips stop roaming his skin and douse himself in a tremble from the missing action. But then there’s a dip of the mattress that sends him sinking behind a bit and a pressure at the back of his shoulder that accompanies the cool line of an exhale skating at the top of his spine. A slow smack of lips retreating from his skin, skittering a second to the back of his neck, the room dawns colder around the outline of Junhui’s lips that remains on him.

He turns to Junhui straightening back up up, their eyes refusing to meet halfway as his breath locks in his throat.

His heart shakes, rattles against the cave of his ribs and trepidation weighing every breath down at the thought of his eyes crossing sight of Junhui’s. When he finally musters a breath, he loses it right away from the hand caressing warmth all over his cheek, sliding down to the column of his neck, and Junhui coaxing the words, any sound out of his lips with his own. A hand slides back up his neck, hooks a thumb behind his ear, only to stroke his cheek over and over again. Wonwoo trembles more for the hand slipping back down to his shoulder, rests gentle strokes over _Cogito_ and lifts back up to the untouched _ergo sum_.

He pulls back for the ache of his lungs, no chance of air when Junhui is the one to steal his breath again before he gets the opportunity to. He doesn’t pull back far, though. His hands pave up the back of Junhui’s neck, one running through the strands and the other anchoring Junhui from moving too far away. A press of their foreheads together, he basks in the quietude of shared space and their lungs breathing each other in.

A glint at Junhui’s eyes, he chuckles out the disbelief of what just happened.

“Do you really think they’re beautiful?” is shy out of his lips.

Junhui nods once against his forehead, keeps him close for a chaste kiss at the corner of his lips there. “So beautiful” has Wonwoo questioning if he’s saying those words about the same thing he’s thinking.

“Thank you, Junhui.” He must look like a fool with the grin on his face, but he would be a bigger fool to punch it off when he notices Junhui mirroring it himself. “I have a whole sketchbook of them.”

“Can I see?” is a child-like wander into the world of art, into the world of his own sketchbook.

“Tell me your favorite flower,” he whispers, dims the grin down when his eyes fixate on the beauty mark at Junhui’s lips, touches the quietest brush of lips there. He can’t pull his eyes away from Junhui’s small smile, “and I’ll show you all of them when I’m done.”

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading!
> 
> the title is from ["living proof" by camila cabello](https://youtu.be/7Rr38h0F5kk)
> 
> also i've dropped from the surface of social media but i'm still at [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.me/miniinfinity) o3o


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